Tim Page
[Photographer, b. 1944, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, lives in Brisbane, Australia.]
...the enemy doesn’t have time to differentiate between you wearing a black T-shirt and a camera and the guy with the Special Forces badge on sitting next to you... your only thought is,
I don’t want to be here, but unfortunately you can’t press a button and delete yourself from the situation. Well you can, but it’s called
dead. 
André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
I always had a small camera with me on the front line, where I made candid, informal photographs, unlike the official photographers for the War Department. They always came with a huge camera on a tripod after the battle was over to make a scenic photograph that would show the destruction.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.
(On seeing photographs of the Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps.)
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
One of the incredibly deep ironies is that the [Abu Ghraib] photographs could serve as both an exposé and as a cover-up. That they would encourage people not to look any further and make them think they had seen everything.
Horst Faas
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, Berlin, Germany, d. 2012, Munich, Germany.]
To get the best picture of a captured prisoner, you have to get him just as he is captured. The expression he wears then is lost forever... The human mechanism is remarkably recuperative. A half hour later, the expressions are gone, the faces have changed. The mother with the dead baby in her arms does not look griefstruck anymore, no matter what she feels.
John Heartfield (Helmut Franz Joseph Herzfeld)
[Artist, b. 1891, Munich, Germany, d. 1968, Berlin.]
... we used authentic shots of war, of the demobilization, of a parade of all the crowned heads of Europe, and the like. These shots brutally demonstrated the horror of war: flame thrower attacks, piles of mutilated bodies, burning cities; war films had not yet come into “fashion,” so these pictures were bound to have a more striking impact on the masses of the proletariat than a hundred lectures.
Sabrina Harman
[U.S. military guard at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, b. 1978, Lorton, Virginia, lives in Virginia.]
Not many people know this shit goes on. The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures and prove the US is not what they think. But I don’t know if I can take it mentally. What if that was me in their shoes. These people will be our future terrorist.
(October 20, 2003, written from Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq to her friend Kelly)
Richard Nixon
[Politician, b. 1913, Yorba Linda, California, d. 1994, New York.]
I’m wondering if that was fixed.
(Nixon doubting the veracity of Nick Ut’s photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing the village of Trang Bang, Vietnam after it was napalm bombed in 1972; from the White House tapes.)
